Havven ICO Review And HVV Token Analysis

Stablecoin built on collateral, not just promises.

Havven ICO Overview

The Havven ICOis raising funds to tackle the elusive promise of the stablecoin. There’s no doubt that cryptocurrency represents a technological improvement on money that removes the need for centralised control to derive value.

While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have demonstrated a capacity to function as a store of value, the inability to adjust supply to changing demand causes short-term volatility. This characteristic makes cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin a poor medium of value exchange because its purchasing power does not remain stable relative to the price of goods and services over the short-term.

Mainstream adoption of crypto for buying and selling will only occur once a certain guarantee of stability can be established. Tokens like Tether have been introduced into the market to address this issue but have yet to present a satisfactory solution. Stability continues to be an fleeting concept that, if implemented correctly, holds the potential for greater utility and ultimately, widespread adoption.

UPDATE: 3/1/2018

Havven team successfully concluded their ICO with a $30M USD raise, becoming Australia’s largest ICO in the process. In addition, Twitter comments unanimously praised the process.

Havven ICO Value Proposition

The Havven ICO proposes a decentralised payment network built on a stablecoin to capture all the benefits of a permissionless system, while also eliminating volatility. Havven plans to achieve price stability by pegging the value of the token to fiat, while simultaneously introducing a decentralized collateral system to provide confidence in the value of the tokens.

Those who use the stablecoin pay fees to those who collateralize the network, compensating them for the risks of providing collateral and stability. Collateral providers in turn control the money supply, and fees are distributed in proportion with each individual’s contribution to stabilisation. Havven rewards suppliers of stability and charges those who demand it.

Underlying this structure is a two token system:

Nomins– a stablecoin with a floating supply and price measured in fiat. Denominating the value of the nomin in an external fiat currency means that stability is relative only to that currency, which will initially be the US dollar.

Havvens– a collateral token (ERC-20) with a static supply. The market capitalization of havvens (HVV) reflects the aggregated value of the Havven platform. The havven token is a decentralised asset, with an intrinsic value derived from the fees generated in the network it has collateralized.

Ownership of havvens grants the right to issue a value of nomins proportional to the dollar value of havvens placed into escrow. Issuance of nomins requires a greater value of havvens to be escrowed in the system (with a collateral ratio of 1:5), providing confidence that nomins can be redeemed for their face value even if the price of havven falls.

In short, the collateral underlying the Havven platform, represented by the havven token, is derived from the the value of the system itself.

Havven ICO Team

Kain Warwick is the Founder and CEO of Havven. Kain has spent the last three years growing parent company Blue Shyft, a network that allows for cash purchases of digital goods and services including cryptocurrency at select retail outlets. He has successfully grown the business to 1200 locations across Australia.

Justin Moses serves as CTO of Havven. He has 8 years of prior experience as Director of Engineering at various companies including most recently, MongoDB, a leading cross-platform database system.

Jordan Momtazi is the VP of Partnerships for Havven. Jordan has served in various partnership building roles throughout his career, including over 2 years with Paypal developing relationships with enterprise clients.

Tim Bass is the Project Lead for blockchain development, with a team of four other developers behind him. Tim is the Co-founder and CEO of Block8, a blockchain platform consultancy that partners with projects like Havven.

The Havven ICO also have a number of advisors supporting the project, including Anthony Nantes, a fintech pioneer in the marketplace lending industry and serial entrepreneur Walter de Brouwer.

Havven ICO Strengths and Opportunities

Havven have an alpha model which users can access to test various economic scenarios on the Havven platform. This is especially beneficial in demonstrating the viability of the token economics set forth in the whitepaper, as they are novel and have yet to be implemented in other systems.

Additionally, Havven have already released their code for Havven platform v.1 for independent audit by two separate organizations. While the alpha model demonstrates the viability of the ecosystem overtime, it is still a model and provides no guarantees.

While no explicit roadmap to adoption has yet been released, in a Telegram chat with CEO Kain Warwick, he outlined a multi-faceted approach that targets both payment aggregators and partnerships with exchanges.

To this end, parent company Blue Shyft maintains a working relationship with all Australia based exchanges through their retail network, which allows cash purchases of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Having successfully established a working infrastructure with exchanges for purchasing cryptocurrency, there is a greater opportunity to implement the platform via these existing relationships.

Havven ICO Weaknesses and Threats

Various attempts have been made or are currently underway to introduce a stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market. The elephant in the room is of course Tether, which has faced a whirlwind of scrutiny around its lack of transparency and monetary policy. This suspicion only further deepened when Friedman LLP, the independent organization hired to audit Tether, terminated their relationship with the project.

Other projects such as MakerDAO and Basecoin are currently implementing their own decentralized stablecoin platforms to meet this deficiency in the market. These platforms have implemented their own collateralization schemes that differ in structure to Havven, which has released comparisons of their own approach to collateralization with both MakerDao and Basecoin via their blog.

Adding further uncertainty to the project, some crypto pundits even question whether the stablecoin concept is viable at all, as no solution has as of yet proven economically sustainable in the long-term. That said, if Havven can indeed introduce a solution to this issue that has plagued the crypto space since its inception, a world of opportunities for wider adoption and use utilities will result.

The Verdict on Havven ICO

From a theoretical perspective, the token economics set forth by the Havven ICO are intriguing and represent improvements on the current market alternatives. The team have already demonstrated their capacity to build and scale a business and have developed valuable relationships with exchanges in the process.

Creating a truly stable cryptocurrency is one of the most pressing needs in the crypto space for establishing a pathway to decreased volatility and unlocking a greater number of use possibilities. If Havven can manage to pull that off, it will be a game changer. But at this early stage with little product development to show, we are a ways off from knowing for certain how the system will operate on the market.

With these factors in mind, we’re going to place a small bet on the Havven ICO.

Learn more about the Havven ICO from our Telegram Community by clicking here.

Havven ICO Review Scores

Summary

The Havven ICO is built on the premise that a stablecoin is virtually a requirement of an effective and safe cryptocurrency ecosystem. While several have tried to create an economy that works with a fiat-pegged token, arguably the most successful - Tether - has been the subject of deep distrust. If Havven can solve the problem, they could be a highly successful company.

Important Dates: Whitelisting- February 21-27 Crowdsale- February 28-March 6

Expected Token Release: 3/15/18

About Our Methodology

The team at Crypto Briefing analyzes an ICO against ten criteria, as shown above.

These criteria are not, however, weighted evenly – our proprietary rating system attributes different degrees of importance to each of the criteria, based on our experience of how directly they can lead to the success of the ICO in question, and its token investors.

As always, please be careful when investing in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) as they can be highly speculative and offer few – if any – guarantees. It is sound practice to never invest more than you can afford to lose.

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Poor quality, weak, or inexperienced leadership can doom a project from the outset. Advisors who serve only to pad their own resumes and who have ill-defined roles can be concerning. But great leadership, with relevant industry experience and contacts, can make the difference between a successful and profitable ICO, and a flub.

If you don’t have a team willing and able to build the thing, it won’t matter who is at the helm. Good talent is hard to find. Developer profiles should be scrutinized to ensure that they have a proven history of working in a field where they should be able to succeed.

What is the technology behind this ICO, what product are they creating, and is it new, innovative, different – and needed?

The IOTA project is a spectacular example of engineers run amok. The technology described or in use must be maintainable, achievable, and realistic, otherwise the risk of it never coming into existence is incredibly high.

Tokens which have no actual use case are probably the worst off, although speculation can still make them have some form of value.

The best tokens we review are the ones that have a forced use case – you must have this token to play in some game that you will probably desire to play in. The very best utility tokens are the ones which put the token holder in the position of supplying tokens to businesses who would be able to effectively make use of the platforms in question.

There doesn’t have to be a market in order for an ICO to score well in this category – but if it intends to create one, the argument has to be extremely compelling.

If there is an existing market, questions here involve whether it is ripe for disruption, whether the technology enables something better, cheaper, or faster (for example) than existing solutions, and whether the market is historically amenable to new ideas.

Most ideas have several implementations. If there are others in the same field, the analyst needs to ensure that the others don’t have obvious advantages over the company in question.

Moreover, this is the place where the analyst should identify any potential weaknesses in the company’s position moving forward. For instance, a fundamental weakness in the STORJ system is that the token is not required for purchasing storage.

With many ICO ideas, the timing may be too late or too early. It’s important for the analyst to consider how much demand there is for the product in question. While the IPO boom funded a lot of great ideas that eventually did come to fruition, a good analyst would recognize when an idea is too early, too late, or just right.

Some of the least compelling ICO propositions are those that claim their founders will achieve some far-off goal, sometime in the future, just so long as they have your cash with which to do it.

More interesting (usually) is the ICO that seeks to further some progress along the path to success, and which has a clearly-identified roadmap with achievable and reasonable milestones along the way. Founders who are already partially-invested in their products are generally more invested in their futures.

Having a strong community is one of the fundamental building blocks of any strong blockchain project. It is important that the project demonstrates early on that it is able to generate and build a strong and empowered support base.

The ICO marketplace is becoming more crowded and more competitive. While in the past it was enough to merely announce an offering, today’s successful ICO’s work hard to build awareness and excitement around their offering.

One of the biggest factors weighing any analysis is price. The lower the price the more there is to gain. But too low of a price may result in an under capitalized project. It is therefore important to evaluate price relative to the individual project, its maturity and the market it is going after.

The total supply of tokens should also be justified by the needs of the project. Issuing a billion tokens for no reason will do nobody any good.

Our analysts employ a proprietary weighting system when evaluating and reporting on cryptocurrency Initial Coin Offerings. These consensus-weighted scores are then translated into a score from 1-100, and the final rating is an algorithmically-generated average of these post-weighted scores.

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